Cathy Preston wrote:Pain is not Suffering. Pain is an experience like any other experience, it comes and goes, suffering occurs when we resist the natural flow, we resist the natural flow because we identify with a self separate from everything around us.

Dennis wrote:epistemology is how we know things.how did the condition 'something is wrong and something to fix' get such a dream run.there's such devotion to it.

Isn't it simply that consciousness itself delineates, divides, separates, the dream then is where we reconcile this in ourselves. If there was no sense that something was wrong, we would never be motivated to uncover the truth.

Cahoot:Pain is if you stub your toe. Pain is the icy embrace of an extremely cold morning. Dukkha is suffering, stress, anxiety, dissatisfaction.

movingalways wrote:The spirit of man is the conscience of consciousness.

The Fall of Man: In Christian doctrine, the fall of man, or simply the fall, refers to the transition of the first humans from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience to God.

The Fall of Man: The Fall of Man (also called "The Story of the Fall" or "The Fall") is the story in the book of Genesis [n the Torah (Old Testament) of when Adam and Eve, in God's eyes, lost their innocence. Genesis says that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge even after God told them it was not allowed. Adam and Eve lost their innocence and were thrown out of the Garden of Eden,

Our purpose is not to develop a conscience it's to forget we ever had one. To return to our innocence. Our Innocence is seeing through the illusion of separation here and now, as Dennis says "transformation is for the mind to see itself in it's activity."#

I am not speaking as a Christian. The bible to me is a book of wisdom of Ultimate Reality.

The God you are addressing is the sentient God of Genesis 2, the one who formed the man, took the man to dress and keep the garden of Eden, tempted the man, shamed the man and then pretended his innocence by walking in the cool of the day demanding to know where his newly formed, newly shamed Son was hiding. This God as presented in Genesis 2 is the Grand Creator of All Things, the Everything of the Everything? How can this be so? His behaviour more mimics that of my grade one teacher who pretended she didn't know that I was hiding in the cloak room until the recess bell went and lo and behold, Pam appeared!

Most people begin the story of God, as you did, with Genesis 2. This is why God has become a sentient God in the minds of all sentient beings, with no way out of the suffering that is the cyclical repeitition of sentience. Birth, pain, pleasure, death, birth, pain, pleasure, death....ad infinitum. Go back one chapter to Genesis 1, however, and you will meet the God of "every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew" - the Spirit God who caused the God who caused it to rain upon the earth and formed a man to till the ground.

By conscience, I do not mean the guilty conscience of Adam and Eve who by the very hand of the Lord God's fall guy, the serpent, were made to eat of the tree, I mean conscious awareness of the suffering that is the appearance of the duplicate sentient God [the something "wrong" as you stated in another post] and the making the "wrong", right again.

Sentience is not good, nor is sentience evil. Sentience is not innocent, nor is it guilty. It is however, the original tender and vulnerable coverup, and being a coverup, can be removed, not only for the sake of the spirit of man's appearance of tenderness and vulnerability, but for the sake of all beings who suffer the same appearance of tenderness and vulnerability, from fruit fly to blue whale.

movingalways wrote:I am not speaking as a Christian. The bible to me is a book of wisdom of Ultimate Reality.

The God you are addressing is the sentient God of Genesis 2, the one who formed the man, took the man to dress and keep the garden of Eden, tempted the man, shamed the man and then pretended his innocence by walking in the cool of the day demanding to know where his newly formed, newly shamed Son was hiding. This God as presented in Genesis 2 is the Grand Creator of All Things, the Everything of the Everything? How can this be so? His behaviour more mimics that of my grade one teacher who pretended she didn't know that I was hiding in the cloak room until the recess bell went and lo and behold, Pam appeared!

Most people begin s the story of God, as you did, with Genesis 2. This is why God has become a sentient God in the minds of all sentient beings, with no way out of the suffering that is the cyclical repeitition of sentience. Birth, pain, pleasure, death, birth, pain, pleasure, death....ad infinitum. Go back one chapter to Genesis 1, however, and you will meet the God of "every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew" - the Spirit God who caused the God who caused it to rain upon the earth and formed a man to till the ground.

By conscience, I do not mean the guilty conscience of Adam and Eve who by the very hand of the Lord God's fall guy, the serpent, were made to eat of the tree, I mean conscious awareness of the suffering that is the appearance of the duplicate sentient God [the something "wrong" as you stated in another post] and the making the "wrong", right again.

Sentience is not good, nor is sentience evil. Sentience is not innocent, nor is it guilty. It is however, the original tender and vulnerable coverup, and being a coverup, can be removed, not only for the sake of the spirit of man's appearance of tenderness and vulnerability, but for the sake of all beings who suffer the same appearance of tenderness and vulnerability, from fruit fly to blue whale.

How many Gods are there? You remove consciousness and you're unconscious. That's why we need to see through it, not remove it. There is nothing really wrong, we experience the illusion of right and wrong when we assume the self has intrinsic meaning, when we believe the self inherently exists. The way we reconcile the illusion of wrong and right is to understand the true nature of all things, empty without inherent existence, everything is interconnected, even consciousness. The self has no intrinsic meaning. When we realize we are in all things and all things are in us we see the totality as the perfection it is, this is innocence, we no longer suffer because we've given up trying to make a mirage real, there is no more anxiety, stress or dissatisfaction, no more illusion of right and wrong. Every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and the herb of the field before it grew, is the formless void, that is whole and motionless at its depths, this is the primordial essence of you and me and everything, this is the Totality. @

Cathy's description, the definitions she works out, are cogent. One CAN indeed look at things like that, and doing that, one is living out of a perspective. What ahe describes might well be a route to eliminate suffering. One would then tolerate pain.

Still, one could achieve basically the same goal (non-suffering) even if one 'believed' in meaning or 'inherency', if one felt one served a higher purpose while one lived within the temporal theatre. The thing about Cathy's structured view---sounding frighteningly like Dennis! Ye gads...;-)---is that it desires to see itself and does see itself as 'the true perception of how things are'. It relies on a science of view, a.kind of metaphysics of 'reality' without seeing that it is also a group of choices and an assigning of values. It is in this sense 'religious' but of course the 'correct' religious view.

Since the goal of it is and can only be to eliminate and avoid 'suffering', it will always move away from life. By definition it cannot move into life or through life. It is a position of sitting in some sense on the sidelines. Inert. Desiring nothing, needing nothing. It is a very attractive position for many reasons.

It is also in certain senses 'feminine'. If we define the masculine as that which invents realities (whole realities to be lived, even if it is done acceptingly, in great virility, tragically) then this path is in a sense a recessive strategy. It is not a.view that can ever mould the world

Kunga wrote:Oh, how wonderful !Now please explain why a 5 month old baby gets raped. Tell me it's an illusion, and there is no right or wrong.

All sin, arises from one error, the false belief in a inherent self, existing apart and separate from everything else, and as we believe so it is, the world of duality is made real. And we are either good or evil, love turns to hate, and life becomes death, pain turns into suffering as we chase our desires in the futile attempt to make the unreal real. When we suffer we begin to look for solutions, we get a feeling of groundhog day, of patterns repeating themselves, we begin to question things more deeply and the journey to resolve our original sin begins. @

yeah...well i geddit...but how's the average person ever gonna geddit...as to not ever commit such atrocities ? actually.. the average person has enough morals to do the right thing...we cann't expect everyone to get enlightenment...but to be at least moral....is better than nothing......

Kunga wrote:Oh, how wonderful !Now please explain why a 5 month old baby gets raped. Tell me it's an illusion, and there is no right or wrong.

All sin, arises from one error, the false belief in a inherent self, existing apart and separate from everything else, and as we believe so it is, the world of duality is made real. And we are either good or evil, love turns to hate, and life becomes death, pain turns into suffering as we chase our desires in the futile attempt to make the unreal real. When we suffer we begin to look for solutions, we get a feeling of groundhog day, of patterns repeating themselves, we begin to question things more deeply and the journey to resolve our original sin begins. @

This may seem underhanded, though it really does go to the center of the issue, but that non-inherent self that is(n't) Cathy has indicated she chows down on the flesh of beings killed for her benefit. The super-Buddhist nirvanic rap is lovely as a sort of disembodied psycho-babble, but the challenge of living one's values, and defining those values, and instituting them (with or without 'duality vs non-duality') is an endeavor requiring deep thought and responsibility.

Talking Ass wrote:This may seem underhanded, though it really does go to the center of the issue, but that non-inherent self that is(n't) Cathy has indicated she chows down on the flesh of beings killed for her benefit. The super-Buddhist nirvanic rap is lovely as a sort of disembodied psycho-babble, but the challenge of living one's values, and defining those values, and instituting them (with or without 'duality vs non-duality') is an endeavor requiring deep thought and responsibility.

All form is illusory it matters not one wit whether I eat a radish or a cow, or if my body is eaten. Better to be honest and eat 40,000 cows, than eat none and tell a lie. "

Cathy, digging a little under the façade you present of 'nirvana' and other such contrivances, one discerns a lack of critical analysis of the 'facts of reality, its problems and challenges, and sees rather a fog bank of pretty words, of idealistic mumbo-jumbo. You provide just one more layer of evidence of the childishness of this unstudied, image-managed, neo-buddhism. One can talk about non-inherency and blather about nirvanic states, but in point of fact living life ethically, thoughtfully and carefully is a very real and very consequential challenge.

Kunga wrote:yeah...well i geddit...but how's the average person ever gonna geddit...as to not ever commit such atrocities ? actually.. the average person has enough morals to do the right thing...we cann't expect everyone to get enlightenment...but to be at least moral....is better than nothing......

No one commits such atrocities, duality is an illusion of a divided mind. The physical world is illusory since it never leaves source, and God is born unto the world through the innocence of man. The innocence of man is realized by seeing through the mirage created by our own divided minds. By understanding that subject and object are one, that which was the cause of duality becomes the cause of heaven, neither being an objective place.

My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon.— Japanese poet

Kunga wrote:...but how's the average person ever gonna geddit...as to not ever commit such atrocities ? actually.. the average person has enough morals to do the right thing...we cann't expect everyone to get enlightenment...but to be at least moral....is better than nothing......

They are average because there's still so much averageness in me. They commit atrocities because there's this atrocity in me. They are not enlightened because I am still not. There's the connectedness of all things, meaning I cannot wash hands with innocence unless I wash everyone with it. And yet it's the fundamental inequality of things which causes all action. Hey there: you are always where the action happens.

It was abrupt and to some extent shocking: that day I invited Dennis and Cathy and David and Dan to share a 'reconcilliation meal' and where I lay me down before the altars of neo-buddhism. I left them chatting about abstract 'things' in the living room and went to the kitchen to cook up the reconcilliation food. The little puppy frolicking at mine heels charmed me but hunger and 'nirvana' got.the best of me and I grabbed him up, hacked off his little head, gutted him and quartered the little yapper all the while watching the moon rise over the burned barn, knowing I was the barn, the moon, the pup, my honored guests.

Oh those tacos! Oh heavens were they delicious! Those little bits of grilled meat in tender corn tortillas I lovingly rolled out myself. Fresh cilantro, garlic, chopped onion, jalapeño pepper, tomato: a glorious sauce for the doggy tacos I offered to mine friends.

"Where's me little puppy?" asks Dennis and I think of the illusion of the world, the meaningless forms arising, dissipating like mist. I look over at Cathy who is chewing the last bite. Everything seems so Buddhistic, so dispassionate.

"We have just eaten that little ball of illusion" I say and set the severed head on the glass coffee table.

No one reacts. We stare straight ahead. Dennis asks.if there is any more and I say Yes, there's enough for two tacos more which I prepare and offer, one to Cathy, one to Dennis.

"The means are part of the truth, as well as the result. The search for truth must itself be true; true research is truth spread out before us, the scattered members of which are reunited in the result."

I was raised on a farm, the meat we raised, plus the vegetables we grew was all we ate. I still remember killing my first chicken, boiling and plucking it, there's something wonderful about raising and tending for your own food. We had horses, cows, pigs, chickens and various wild things that would decide to spend winters near our shelters. Our garden was huge, the garden, plus the animals were a lot of work, but the result was obvious and delicious.#